Most of you are probably aware of the weekly round up or “Spike Activity” appearing every Friday at Mind Hacks. But for those of you who don’t, today’s version was really a great one.

First up, no pun intended, is the study over at Cognitive Daily on condoms: “Cognitive Daily covers a sobering study on sex education that found ‘among sexually active teens, actual condom use bears no relationship to intention to use a condom or belief that using condoms is a good idea. The only factors in their study that correlate with using condoms are buying and carrying condoms’.”

Probably not a big suprise to most anthropologists, where the difference between what people say versus what people do is ground into aspiring ethnographers. It also reminded me of my work with teenage drug users – carrying drugs around was always a good indicator of a real problem, despite many teens’ assertions to the contrary.

Channel N is featuring a video on how obesity spreads through social networks. For those of you looking for research on this topic, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler published a landmark article in the New England Journal of Medicine on “The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years” (full text).

PLoS Biology has an important article just out entitled “On Mice and Men, and Chandelier Neurons” (full text) aiming at what makes human brains different, with a focus on short-axon neurons in the frontal cortex.

Then we have cognitive neuroscience in relation to freewill and in relation to philosophy of the mind, as well as Newsweek’s recent article on cognitive neuroscience itself.

Plus even more, so hack into this spike or even those in the past.